Using PsyToolkit with MTurk

The Amazon Mechanical Turk platform is great for paying online
participants for your online studies. This lessons explains how to do
this.

Using PsyToolkit with MTurk is super easy!

Creating your survey

Just set up your survey as you would normally do. Make sure you have
compiled it and that it actually works before you go on.

The only thing you need is to have a unique code for each MTurk
participant which you give back at the of the survey. The MTurk
participant needs to end this number manually in the MTurk website in
order to get the reward.

There are two different ways to do it (choose one, if not sure, take
the easy way).

The easy way

The easy way: When you work on your survey, click the option "give
participant a unique code" (see image below).

The slightly more difficult way

You can create a random number yourself. Just create a set question
and then show the result in an info question, for example as follows:

Setting up an MTurk project.

Of course, first of all you need to have an MTurk account. If you
want to setup MTurk projects, you need to become a so-called
requester. This is the link to set up your account:
https://www.mturk.com/get-started.

STEP 1: Create a new MTurk project.

STEP 2: Change the survey link

The only slightly difficult part is to change the survey link. They
could have made this easier in the MTurk website, but here you get it
all explained:

Goto Design Layout

Under "Design Layout" you see the preview of what participants will
see. You need to change the link to your survey URL.

Remove their blue example text (which is a link, usually something
like http://example.com/survey345.html). You should end up with just
the black text "Survey link:" as below.

Write in something, for example "Click this link to the
survey". This is not yet a link, we make it a link later.

Then select that text (thus the "Click this link to the survey"),
and then make it into a link with clicking the link symbol, which I
highlighted in the image below.

In the link "dialog", enter the PsyToolkit survey URL

Set the "target" to new window (this means that when the MTurk
clicks the link, it will open a new browser tab).

Save your MTurk project and try it.

Data analysis

When you download your spreadsheet from the survey, you will see your
endcode in it. With that, you will also have a start and end time of
the PsyToolkit survey. You can match this with the MTurk data.